Cry it out. Formula feeding. Home birth. Circumcision. Attachment parenting. Name a parenting choice, and I can find you at least fifty thousand angry arguments about why it's wrong. Or right, depending on who's doing the arguing. There's one consistent truth about parenting, and that's that however you choose to raise your child, someone thinks you're screwing it all up ... and they won't think twice about telling you how you SHOULD be doing it.

If you didn't get a chance to read through this Slate article on bad baby advice throughout history, it's definitely worth a look. It's amusing to see proof that people have been telling moms how to raise their kids for hundreds of years, and that some of the old-school advice that sounds utterly insane to us now isn't all that different from today's parenting trends.

For instance:

Don't spoil your baby with night feedings. In the '60s, a pediatrician came out with a book called Bringing Up Babies, in which he instructed parents to raise their infants under strict schedules.

Absolutely no night feedings, he wrote, no matter how young the baby, nor how much it cried. “If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand, we must admit the possibility that we are sowing the seeds of socialism,” Sackett warned, likening overindulgent parents to Hitler and Stalin.

Outrageous! Horrible! And ... hmmm, doesn't sound that different from the Ferber Method, actually. Except maybe without the Hitler part.

Toilet train your newborn.

In 1935, a U.S. Department of Labor “Infant Care” pamphlet called an infant’s regulation of his bowels and bladder a key part of his “character building.” Mothers were instructed to start bowel training their babies at 2 months of age, holding the baby over the “chamber” at the precise same time each day, and “using a soap stick, if necessary” to provoke a movement. By 6 to 8 months, the pamphlet predicted, the baby would be trained, and by 10 months, parents could start in on bladder training.

What? Utter madness! What kind of crazy person would try and potty train an infant? Aside from all the advocates of elimination communication, that is. Judging by this description from DiaperFreeBaby.com, the only thing that's changed (aside from the soap stick) is the fancier way we have of talking about it:

It is a gentle, natural, non-coercive process by which a baby, preferably beginning in early infancy, learns with the loving assistance of parents and caregivers to communicate about and address his or her elimination needs.

Smear your baby in lard.

Several advice books around the turn of the century advised that newborns be “well smeared” in lard, olive oil, or “fresh butter.”

Rub an amount of a pure, natural oil -- such as almond or olive oil -- on your baby's scalp and leave it on for about 15 minutes.

I could keep going, but you get the point. Yesterday's nutso-sounding baby advice isn't really all that bizarre, especially when you consider how almost everything eventually comes back in style. Pre-mastication, anyone?

Do you think any current baby advice will sound weird to people in the future?